Youth participatory action research as an empowerment-based method for community change

ABSTRACT

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) centers the experiences of young people as experts in issues impacting their lives. The process of engaging in YPAR has potential to create positive outcomes for youth researchers, including skills associated with empowerment. As such, YPAR is a valuable method for building community power and capacity for change. Little is understood about the process by which empowerment happens through YPAR, including how youth develop a sense of themselves as changemakers and the indicators that an empowering space and process have been created. The current study identified components of youth empowerment rooted in the experiences of young people who were involved in YPAR. Data were collected through an initiative between university researchers and three community-based organizations. The project included development of three YPAR teams with a total of 15 youth and young adult researchers. Data for this study were drawn from post-project focus groups and observation tools that were completed at each YPAR team meeting. Using a theory-driven coding structure for empowerment, the researchers used an iterative qualitative analysis process to identify key indicators of empowerment that emerged from the data. Examples of how they manifested provide valuable insight to community practitioners as well as community-engaged researchers as they work to support community leadership and power building.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory action research
• youth
• empowerment
• community

Acknowledgments

The authors want to acknowledge and honor the labor and contributions of the youth researchers who participated in the project, the community organizations who believed in them and supported their work, and the community leaders, activists, and university professors who contributed their time and expertise to the youth-led research studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Virginia Commonwealth University [Presidential Research Quest Fund 2019].